标题:Mission creep at the Fed Aug 7th 2008 | WASHINGTON, DC From The Economist print edition In a special section marking the anniversary of the credit crunch, we start with the Federal Reserve. Its creative response to the crisis may have staved off catastrophe, but may also have put its independence at risk 这次信贷危机周年，我们从联准会开始谈起。联准会对此次危机的创意回应可能化解了 灾难，但可能也让联准会自己的独立性受到影响。 WHEN he was still in academia, Ben Bernanke once argued that Franklin Roosevelt’s greatest contribution to ending the Great Depression was not a specific policy, but his “willingness to be aggressive and to experiment…to do whatever it took to get the country moving again.” That would fairly describe how Mr Bernanke has battled perhaps the biggest financial crisis since FDR’s time, which erupted one year ago this week. Bernanke还在学术界的时候，曾论述说罗斯福总统对美国经济大萧条的最大贡献不是 一个特定的政策，而是他「愿意采取积极态度并且愿意实验...用任何方法让国家再次 动起来。」这也可以用来形容Bernanke自己如何对抗可能是自罗斯福时代以来最大的、 就在去年的这个礼拜爆发的金融危机。 The chairman of the Federal Reserve has cast aside any notion that central bankers should be boring. He has slashed interest rates; rolled out a dizzying array of new lending programmes; backed the debt of Bear Stearns, a failing investment bank; agreed to lend to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, America ’s troubled, quasi-private mortgage agencies; argued for fiscal stimulus and mortgage write-downs; and proposed an expansion of the Fed’s regulatory domain. 这位联准会主席不符合中央银行人员应该很无趣的印象。他大幅削减利率；提出一系列 的新型借贷模式；对濒临破产的Bear Stearns紧急放贷；同意房利美和房地美的借贷案 来保护美国这两间半私有的房贷机构；为财政刺激方案和房贷减计资产辩护；同时提出了 扩张联准会的调节域。 The Fed did not seek its bigger role, but acted because no one else could. Mr Bernanke is now consumed with responsibilities he never imagined when he became chairman in early 2006. Since the crisis broke, he has been at his desk seven days a week, fuelled by cans of Diet Dr Pepper from a small refrigerator in his office. Even if his aggression and experimentation do not prevent a recession, they have softened the impact of falling house prices, rising default rates and the credit squeeze on America’s economy. But they have also created new political risks for the Fed. 联准会没有寻求扮演更大的角色，而是因为没有人可以反应所以反应。Bernanke现在 必须承担他在2006年成为主席之後从未想过的责任。自从危机爆发後，他就一个礼拜 七天坐在办公桌前，靠自己办公室里的冰箱塞满的Diet Dr Pepper充电。即便他的 积极和试验没有办法避免经济衰退，但这些举动把直直落的房价、冲高的坏帐比率、 以及信贷紧缩等等的冲击减缓了。但是这些问题仍然为联准会造成新的政治风险。 The central bank is lending to private companies on an unprecedented scale and is thus making decisions it long sought to avoid about the allocation of credit. It is also acquiring new powers of oversight. Politicians could chafe at the Fed’s power: why, they might ask, should unelected officials choose who benefits from taxpayers’ money? And they might press the central bank to pursue political ends—such as propping up favoured borrowers—that interfere with monetary policy. 该中央银行以史无前例的规模借贷给私人公司，也就是说联准会正在推动长久以来希望 避免的配置信用的决定。联准会正在吞并新的监督力量。政治人物可能会对联准会的 力量感到不满：他们可能会问，为什麽非经过选举的官员可以选择谁可得利於税捐人的 税金？他们也可能会为政治目的对联准会施压──如帮受他们青睐的借款人备好银弹 这些会干预货币政策的行为。 Events beyond the Fed’s control magnify these risks. Unemployment and inflation are likely to remain uncomfortably high for the next year or two; such a combination has fuelled political antagonism in the past. And the next president will have an instant opportunity to fill three seats on the Fed’s seven-member board of governors (one is vacant; another soon will be; a third governor’s term has expired). He and Congress will have a chance to shape the Fed’s priorities on both regulation and monetary policy. 联准会管不到的事件让这些风险显得更大。失业与通澎在接下来一两年看来都会居高 不下；这种组合在过去曾让政治对立加温。下伊任总统会立即有机会提名三席联准会 的理事委员。一席已经待补；另外一席很快就要空出来；第三席则是有位理事委员任期 将届。新上任的总统和国会有机会能主导联准会在管制和货币方面的政策的优先顺序。 So far there is no congressional clamour to rein in the Fed, and Mr Bernanke thinks its monetary independence is safe. “We’ve been able to keep a good separation between monetary policy and these other areas,” he told Congress last month. But his predecessors worry, nonetheless. Paul Volcker urged Congress in May that if it wanted to prop up favoured sectors, it should do so transparently, not through the Fed. “That’s the way to destroy the Federal Reserve in the long run.” Alan Greenspan, in the paperback edition of his memoir, due out next month, makes a similar argument (see article). 目前，国会没有明显鼓噪要求联准会收敛，同时Bernanke认为其货币政策独立性仍是 安全的。「我们一向能够维持货币政策和其他领域的距离， Fed officials note that although they have acted in new ways, other central banks have done similar things. They point out that the European Central Bank (ECB) has long had the ability to lend against a wide variety of government and private collateral, as the Fed now does. 联准会官员指出，虽然他们已经采用新的路线，其他中央银行也采取了类似的措施。 他们指出，欧洲中央银行常有以来就有能力借贷给不同的政府或私人质押，现在 联准会也有了。 But the Fed’s independence is more tenuous than the ECB’s. The Federal Reserve Act is much easier to change than the Maastricht treaty. The Fed is also required to strive for both full employment and price stability, whereas stable prices are the ECB’s sole aim. Moreover, Americans traditionally are more suspicious than Europeans of giving any government body so much sway. In the first century of its existence the United States established two central banks, but closed them out of suspicion of such centralised power. The Fed, a blend of public and private authority, was set up only in 1913. 但联准会的独立性比起欧洲央行更加薄弱。联邦储备法比起马城条约更易调动。联准会 也被要求要能够为全就业以及物价稳定努力，而欧洲央行只需负责稳定物价。更加上 美国人比起欧洲人来说，对赋予政府权力更保持戒心。美国成立第一个世纪里成立过 两间中央银行，但都因为这类集权机制所以把他们关闭了。联准会是以公权和私权共同 扶持起的机构，也才是1913年成立的机构。 History suggests the Fed is especially vulnerable at times of economic turmoil. The Depression led to an overhaul that shifted power from its reserve banks to Washington, DC. The stagflation of the 1970s coincided with congressional efforts to take control of the Fed’s budget and the requirement that it seek both full employment and stable prices. The crisis that began a year ago may yet mark another turning-point in the relationship between America’s politicians and its central bank. 历史显示，联准会在经济波动大的时候特别脆弱。经济大萧条让联准会的权力从各地 中央银行移转到华盛顿。1970年代的停滞性通澎似造成了国会希望控制联准会预算以及 要求联准会为全就业和物价稳定努力。去年开始的危机可能又成为美国政客和中央银行 之间关系改变的转捩点。 By far Mr Bernanke’s most innovative response to the credit crisis has been the expansion of the Fed’s tool kit from control of short-term interest rates to the deployment of its balance-sheet to restore liquidity to specific markets, such as that for inter-bank loans. A year ago 91% of the Fed’s assets were invested in government bonds. Now the share is 52%. Loans to banks and investment banks backed by a hotch-potch of collateral account for the difference (see chart 1). 目前，Bernanke对信贷危机最有创意的回应就是扩张联准会的工具箱，从控制短期利率到 能策略性安排自己的损益表，到恢复特定市场的流动性，一如这次恢复银行间互贷 的措施。一年前，91％的联准会资产都投资在政府债券上。现在比例是52％。给银行和 投资银行的借贷，同时还佐以各类的抵押户口，就是调整的手段。 Mr Bernanke often notes this simply returns the Fed to its roots as lender of last resort: it was created primarily to prevent financial panics. But now that its lending goes beyond the federal government, it faces fine judgments. To whom should it lend and on what terms? And how does it avoid becoming a crutch for markets that cannot stand up on their own? Bernanke常指出这只是单纯地让联准会回归其作为危机时刻的借贷者角色：联准会的 成立就是为了避免金融恐慌。但现在联准会的借贷已经超出联邦政府范围时，它就面临 更仔细的评估。联准会可以借给谁，用什麽条件借？联准会如何避免成为一些自己无法 站起的市场的柺杖？ Politicians have asked the Fed to favour certain industries or keep interest rates low almost from its birth. In 1921 the Fed rejected requests from Congress to buy long-term agricultural debt. In the 1940s and again in the 1960s, under pressure from the Treasury, it bought bonds to hold down long-term interest rates. In the 1970s, at the behest of Congress, it bought the debt of federal agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A 2002 staff study pointed out the risks of favouring particular assets or borrowers: it could result in too much investment in preferred sectors and too little in others, drag the Fed into arguments about fiscal policy and compromise its monetary policy. In recent decades the Fed largely extracted itself from anything resembling credit allocation. The last of its Fannie bonds matured in 2003. In the past year the current has begun to reverse. When the crisis first hit, Mr Bernanke’s first step was to lower the interest rate and lengthen the term on direct loans to banks from the Fed’s discount window. When banks were slow to respond, the Fed devised its “term auction facility” to make loans at the discount window cheaper and more anonymous (and therefore with less stigma for the borrowing bank). It was creative, but not radical: the Fed has always lent to banks, though seldom on such a scale, and the eligible collateral is the same. The facility is likely to become permanent. Subsequent steps have strayed further from tradition. In March the Fed created a facility to swap up to $200 billion of its Treasuries for investment banks’ holdings of hard-to-trade mortgage-backed securities. A week later it took over $30 billion (later lowered to $29 billion) of Bear Stearns’ obligations to prevent a chaotic failure of the firm and enable its takeover by JPMorgan Chase. It also opened its discount window to investment banks, the first time since the Depression that non-banks had borrowed from that window. And in July it agreed to lend to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the window should it “prove necessary”. Although each step was a logical, targeted response to financial upheaval, the result was to prop up certain firms and markets. Vincent Reinhart, a former Fed staffer now at the American Enterprise Institute, says it is ironic that the Fed named the special-purpose vehicle that holds the Bear Stearns assets Maiden Lane, after the street behind the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The bail-out opened a back door to the Fed that makes it much harder to say no to similar pleas, he argues. The pleas soon started coming. In April Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, demanded that the Fed permit top-rated securities backed by student loans to qualify for its $200 billion swap programme. “If the Fed and the treasury can commit $30 billion of taxpayer money to enable the takeover of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase, then surely they can step in to enable working families to achieve the dream of a higher education for their children,” he declared. Two weeks later the Fed said it would accept any AAA-rated securities as collateral, including those backed by student loans. Mr Dodd praised the decision. But Allan Meltzer, a Fed historian at Carnegie Mellon University, cringed, saying it looked as if the Fed had caved in to political pressure: “ It gets close to the idea of credit allocation. And every Fed chairman without exception worried about that.” Fed officials say the move was in the works before Mr Dodd spoke up. The central bank has turned down other entreaties, notably to buy mortgage-backed securities directly. Officials do not deny that some of their programmes move closer to credit allocation: that is why they were “designed to be self-liquidating as markets improve”, Donald Kohn, vice-chairman of the Fed, said in May. However, self-liquidation is not imminent. On July 30th the Fed extended and expanded several of its programmes, for example extending investment banks’ access to the discount window until at least the end of January. In any event, the expiry of new arrangements will not restore the previous status quo. Vikram Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive, said in June that “ regardless of whether that window is officially opened or closed, the market now assumes that it will be opened if necessary on an ad hoc basis.” Now that the Fed has extended public backing beyond banks to investment banks and the mortgage giants, it is likely, logically enough, to oversee the borrowers. But in expanding the Fed’s non-monetary duties, America is going against the international trend of recent years. Central banks should be independent, the theory goes, because the power to spend money should be separate from the power to print it. By the same reasoning, many central banks have given up non-monetary tasks, such as bank supervision, because they involve more political judgments that could interfere with monetary policy. Hank Paulson, America’s treasury secretary, has advocated a similar arrangement, but the Bear Stearns episode upended the landscape. The Fed’s new duties have not been formalised, but they will be greater, as will the potential for conflict over how it uses them. With these new duties, “it’s getting into areas that are not typically thought to require the degree of independence that monetary policy does,” Mr Volcker noted. Although the Fed could make regulatory decisions less political, those decisions could also politicise the Fed. It could identify too closely with the firms it regulates, and err in favour of financial stability rather than price stability when the two are at odds. It could be drawn into contentious debates about how financial institutions should run themselves. And it may be blamed when the next crisis occurs. There is a precedent: in 1994 Congress gave the Fed broad authority to act against abusive mortgage loans. Democrats have repeatedly charged that the Fed’s failure to use those powers more energetically worsened the sub-prime crisis. Ben Bernanke, policy wonk As well as adding to the Fed’s policy tools and supervisory duties, Mr Bernanke has also waded into matters that do not involve the Fed directly, something for which Mr Greenspan was often criticised. At first Mr Bernanke sought to stay out of such debates. That has since changed, as he has supported fiscal stimulus and sweeping writedowns of troubled mortgages. He has also commented on exchange rates, a subject normally left to the Treasury. Mr Bernanke’s interventions have, like his creative use of the Fed’s balance-sheet, taken some of the burden of economic stabilisation off interest rates. He has avoided endorsing specific controversial proposals. It also helps that Democrats see him as prodding the executive branch towards action. His sharpest critics in Congress are conservative Republicans. The risk, though, is that one day Mr Bernanke will have to take a view more at odds with the party in power. And that could happen when the economic circumstances are particularly testing. For the next year or two, the Fed is unlikely to achieve either full employment or price stability, if its forecasts are correct (see chart 2). The Fed is in no hurry to tighten policy. On August 5th, when it held interest rates at 2%, it backtracked on its earlier optimism about growth, suggesting it would raise rates later rather than sooner. But if inflation expectations rise, it may have to increase rates while unemployment is unpalatably high. A similar set of circumstances in the early 1990s coincided with congressional efforts to strip reserve-bank presidents, who then as now were more hawkish than governors, of their votes on interest rates. Ominously, this comes at a time when appointments to the Fed have become more politicised. Just as Republicans did when they controlled the Senate in the late 1990s, Democrats have refused to move on many of George Bush’s recent nominations to the Fed, arguing that filling the empty seats is a job for the next president—even though governors have staggered, 14-year terms precisely to distance the Fed from the political cycle. Of the two presumptive presidential nominees, Barack Obama has, perhaps surprisingly, been more forthright than John McCain in supporting the independence of the Fed. (That may reflect the influence of Mr Volcker, who advises Mr Obama.) Nevertheless, American politics are becoming more populist and interventionist, and the Fed may not be spared. What might be done to reduce these risks to the central bank? Consensus has emerged on one point: the need for clear responsibility when the failure of a financial institution threatens the entire economy. A formal procedure exists for bailing out an insolvent bank’s depositors and then winding down the institution; Mr Bernanke and others favour something similar for investment banks. Mr Greenspan proposes a “standby panel of senior federal financial authorities” to determine when a failure is important enough to merit intervention. But the job may inevitably fall to the Fed. “The Fed is the only agency that has the power to serve as a liquidity provider of last resort, a power that has proved critical in financial crises throughout history,” Mr Bernanke noted last month. But whether that also means the Fed must remain a day-to-day supervisor, as he contends, is less clear. Moving those responsibilities, now shared by a patchwork of agencies, to a separate body, as Mr Paulson first proposed, could both rationalise America’s regulatory structure and make the Fed a smaller political target. The Fed itself could do more to ensure that its eventual mix of duties does not interfere with its commitment to price stability. Mr Bernanke has long said a numerical inflation target would be a safeguard of the Fed’s independence: sacrificing the target to other priorities would demand explanation. When some colleagues balked at a target, he agreed to a compromise: policymakers would publish three-year economic forecasts, and their third-year inflation number would be a proxy target. But the system is already showing its weaknesses. The energy-price shock forced officials to raise the third-year inflation forecast by a tenth of a percentage point in June, with none of the public debate a change in a target would have entailed. Frederic Mishkin, who is stepping down as a governor on August 31st, said recently that the Fed should publish forecasts for five or more years to make their preferred inflation rate more explicit and harder to abandon. The Fed’s creativity in the past year was justified; it stepped in when no other agency or political body could or would. But it should not ignore the risks it runs as a result. Among Roosevelt’s actions during the Depression was an overhaul of the Fed’s governance, making it more responsive to Washington. Mr Bernanke would no doubt prefer that this is one aggressive experiment that will not be repeated. http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?source= hptextfeature&story_id=11897000 新闻来源: (需有正确连结) -- --

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